While Laughing Gulls Flourish, Airport Officials Fret

By JOSEPH P. FRIED

Published: May 1, 1990

The laughing gull is making a comeback in the New York area - to the delight of naturalists and the dismay of officials at Kennedy International Airport. The laughing gull's growing numbers, in a nesting colony on marshes at the end of a busy Kennedy runway, increasingly pose a hazard to planes landing and taking off, the officials say.

Now the airport's operator, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, has entered into an uneasy alliance with the National Park Service to do something about the problem.

The joint venture is to include suffocating the embryos in most of the eggs that will be laid in the coming weeks by the 6,000-strong colony of laughing gulls, which recently arrived for its annual nesting in the marshes just off the airport in southern Queens. The marshes are part of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, which the Park Service, a Federal agency, supervises.

Catastrophic Consequences

The service and the Port Authority agree on the potentially catastrophic consequences when flocks of birds meet moving planes. Birds sucked into jet engines can cause them to stall and sometimes to crash: 26 civilian deaths in the United States have been attributed to bird-aircraft encounters since 1969. The birds can also inflict considerable structural damage in lesser collisions, despite the vast differences in size between nature's flying creatures and man's metallic versions.

But the two agencies do not seem to agree on how their effort might contribute to solving the laughing-gull problem at Kennedy.

''We'd like the birds to relocate,'' said Jack Gartner, the manager of aeronautical services for the airport. The colony nests from April to September on Joco Marsh, Silver Hole Marsh and East High Meadow, just off the Jamaica Bay end of a runway known as Runway 4 Left-22 Right.

He said that the plan to suffocate the embryos - by coating the egg shells with mineral oil, which prevents air from getting through, while posing no threat to adult gulls or other wildlife - could succeed in discouraging the colony from nesting there again. He said it was the least environmentally threatening alternative suggested by a panel of ornithologists.

But relocating the laughing-gull colony is the the Port Authority's goal, not the Park Service's, said John T. Tanacredi, a Park Service official. ''Our intent is to investigate and explore this population and find out its definitive actions in relation to aircraft,'' he said.

To the Park Service, Dr. Tanacredi said, the purpose of oiling the eggs is to observe the adult gulls' behavior when the necessity of leaving the nest to search for food for their young has been removed. Should the embryo suffocations cause the colony not to return, that would possibly be a ''subset of an objective,'' said the official, who is chief of natural resources and compliance at the Gateway National Recreation Area, which includes the wildlife refuge.

Dr. Tanacredi stressed that killing most of one year's batch of eggs, known as a ''clutch,'' would not have a significant impact on the size of the colony, and added that the step would be only one part of a project limited to one year. Other actions will include placing small radio devices on birds to track their movements and studying other bird species in the area.

Worse at Kennedy

The president of the New York City Audobon Society, Ronald Bourque, said, ''We go along with this year's experiment, but we are very much concerned about the future, that they don't reach out farther into the refuge.''

The bird problem is worse at Kennedy than at other New York City area airports because of such nearby attractions as the wildlife refuge and the city's garbage landfill southeast of the marshes at Edgemere, Queens, Mr. Gartner said. Three Kennedy employees work fulltime to shoo birds from the runways, using such tactics as firing propane-gas cannons.

Laughing gulls, which weigh about a pound, sound like a person laughing and have a wingspan of 30 inches. The species virtually disappeared from the area early in the century when they were shot for their feathers, which were used in hats. They have been returning in the last decade, just as other gull species have been declining around Kennedy, Mr. Gartner said.

He noted that the three other species in the airport area feed largely on garbage, and one landfill near the airport closed in 1985; the remaining Edgemere one is scheduled to close next year. Because the laughing gulls feed on marine life and insects, other steps are needed to nudge them to move, he said.

Bringing Down a B-1

Since 1969, aircraft-bird encounters have led to 97 civilian aviation accidents in the United States, involving 26 deaths, according to Michael Benson, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board.

But there are many more less serious ''bird strikes'' - nearly 1,500 were reported for civilian aviation in the country in 1988 and 354 at Kennedy last year - and aviation experts say they cause tens of millions of dollars of damage annually.

The military also faces the problem. In 1987 an Air Force B-1 bomber on a low-level training flight crashed in Colorado, killing three of the crew, when a bird the size of a pelican slammed into it.A $40 million effort followed to harden the entire B-1 fleet against bird damage.

In the worst mishap at Kennedy itself, an Overseas National Airways DC-10 jetliner with more than 140 people aboard struck a flock of black-backed gulls while halfway down the runway while taking off in 1975. A bird-choked engine stalled, fell off the wing, ruptured fuel tanks and ignited a fire, but those aboard scrambled off after a emergency stop with only minor injuries before the plane was engulfed in flames.

Photo: Laughing gulls in the air near Kennedy International Airport. The bird is making a comeback in the area, to the delight of some and the dismay of others. (Eddie Hausner/The New York Times)